An epic of obsession and murder

Shadow Country

By Peter Matthiessen

Published by Maclehose Press, 2010

Available at Amazon.com, US$12 (Bt370)

Reviewed by James Eckardt

 

Architects have the Pritzker Award, mathematicians the Fields Medal, and novelists have the William Dean Howells Medal, awarded every five years to American writers, who have included Willa Cather, William Faulkner, John Cheever and Thomas Pynchon. 

The latest winner is Peter Matthiessen for “Shadow Country”, his epic novel about Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands and the life of pioneer sugar-cane planter and prolific murderer Edgar J Watson (1855-1910).

“Shadow Country” is the author’s re-editing into one volume of his trilogy: “Killing Mister Watson” (1990), “Lost Man’s River” (1997) and “Bone by Bone” (1999). The task took him seven years. 

The cumulative novel begins as it ends. On the shore of the hamlet of Chokoloskee, devastated by the great 1910 hurricane, a score of friends and neighbours pump 33 bullets into Mr EJ Watson.  

Why? Because Watson had a bloody history, which provides the meat of this 900-page tale. 

Book One is told in the voices of Watson’s family, friends and enemies. From a dozen angles, they provide a choral commentary on the Watson legend. The bare bones are these: 

Born into a South Carolina planter family gone to seed, Watson flees a drunken and violent father and finds refuge with relatives in northern Florida. Accused of murder, he flees with his wife and two young children to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. 

Here, the story is that he shot the “outlaw queen” Belle Starr. He escapes prison, returns to Florida and earns a legal grubstake by killing a very nasty character named Quinn Bass. He sets himself up as a sugar-cane planter in the lawless Ten Thousand Islands, sailing his schooner to Key West to sell hogs, fruit and his “Island Pride” cane syrup.

His reputation has preceded him, though, and his new neighbours are nervous. 

“Word got out on the southwest coast,” says one of them, “that EJ Watson was a wanted man, which explained why he come to the islands in the first place. And even though plenty of other men was known to have come to the Everglades frontier for the same reason, folks began to worry. We felt more at home with common ol’ backcountry killers than with some well-dressed desperado out of the Wild West.”

Watson prospers, building the first real house on the coast and raising seven children with three wives, plus a couple more with temporary common-law wives. He is hard-working, hard-drinking, affable, funny and generous to his neighbours. Scattered in shacks along the coast, they eke out a living by hunting and fishing and selling alligator hides and egret quills in Key West. The original Indian tribes have long retreated into the depths of the Everglades. 

But again, Watson is accused of a series of murders, mostly of his workers but also of a fugitive couple from Key West, Wally and Bet Tucker, who were squatting on Lost Man’s Key, an island claimed by Watson. Bet Tucker was eight months pregnant.  

Book Two sags at times. The story now is told from the obsessive perspective of Watson’s son Lucius, who grew up idolising his father. An historian of the people of the coast, Lucius sets out to exonerate his father of at least some of the murders attributed to him. But the effect to rake over well-trodden ground. 

There are brilliant set pieces in this section, but the overall effect is of treading water. 

Book Three is told by EJ Watson himself, and the narrative picks up to a blistering pace. His voice is rollicking, sly, tender, sardonic, deranged, angry, lyrical, remorseful and bleakly humorous – a voice as authentic as Huckleberry Finn’s.

He is prone to black moods and drunken binges: “Morning after morning, I woke up sick to death on some sawdust floor or in some shed or ditch, and finally in a stinking Suwannee jail, bruised, bilious, broke, and mean down to the bone.”  

In the end he is no heartless killer, but tormented by his crimes. Toward the end he reflects, “For taking a human life, one paid with one’s own. To extinguish the light in another’s eyes was the death of self: those eyes, reflected forever in your own, would never close.”